The Painter of Shanghai (41 page)

But there is. There’s a moment of shivering silence – an enormous inner breath – not unlike the emptiness she’d felt atop Notre Dame. And then she’s falling, tumbling down to him, Washing Silk Woman hurling herself into a surge of skin and fluid and rippling muscle. There are waves and then more waves. She is washed onto his chest, astonished. And when the tears fall, she doesn’t question them. She barely feels them at all.

34

The next day breaks with the bright vengeance of early summer. Sun pours through the small, square window overlooking black rooftops and pink chimney pots, bouncing off the cracked red tiles of the floor. It pounds Yuliang’s eyelids open; and groggily, she takes in her tiny, top-floor alcove: the little stove, the chipped washbasin and pitcher. The piles of books, papers, and sketches. The untouched canvas against the wall. It is the latter that sparks the first wave of panic.
The salon
, she thinks.
I still haven’t even started.

Then a leg moves against her thigh, and the rest of it comes back. Bolting upright, she sees Xudun in bed beside her. For an instant there is there nothing other than a sheer and shocked horror. Then he opens his eyes. Smiling sleepily, he rolls over and wraps her in his arms.

And for one of the very few times in Yuliang’s life, her mind goes almost as blank as her waiting canvas.

It is late afternoon by the time Yuliang finally manages to push him out the door. Afterwards she straightens up distractedly; making the tiny bed, sweeping crumbs from their lunch off the floor. When she at last sits down between her easel and her mirror – still naked, in her brightly patterned old armchair – the light coming through the window is tinged with garnet. Taking stock of her
image, Yuliang sees she is too: she looks pink and dreamy, touched by the day’s reflections. Her eyes ache from lack of sleep, her muscles from stairs and new exertions. There is a familiar and yet entirely new soreness between her legs, and even noticing it is enough to tempt her to race into the street after him. And yet this, she knows, would be disastrous. Almost as disastrous, in fact, as allowing herself to truly contemplate what’s just happened. (
Don’t think
.)

Instead, she forces her focus to the canvas before her. She lets all her unmade decisions, her confused affections, her unfinished letter (
Beloved husband
) hover beyond her thoughts, like white moths tapping at her happiness. She will think about it all later. After the painting’s painted. And after it’s dried, wrapped, delivered to the salon. After she meets Xudun again in one week, back at the Café de Cluny, and has had a chance to think away from these paint-thinner fumes.

For today, there is just this: her new-old skin. Her blank canvas. Mirror Girl, watching her with languid interest. Arms folded behind her head, Yuliang takes in the lazy eyes, the flushed cheeks. The sated flesh. Humming to herself, she reaches for her palette. She will, she decides, paint herself just like this: in her lush chair, her skin the color of a summer sunset. A triad of color: peach and gold and rose pink. A neutral violet for unity and control – qualities she’ll examine, for today, on the canvas alone.

PART EIGHT
The Wives

To yield, I have learned, is to come back again.

Taoist proverb

35. Nanjing, 1936

‘Before we begin,’ Xu Beihong announces, ‘I’d like to remind everyone that Teacher Pan’s seventh solo exhibition is in two weeks.’ He turns to Yuliang. ‘It’s at the Shanghai Exhibition Space again, isn’t it?’

Yuliang nods. Her old friend and mentor takes a sip of his coffee before setting it down with a grimace. He drinks it like a rich man now: as black as pitch, as black as crow, made fresh each morning by a fetching young secretary. Despite his attentive tutelage, however, the girl (at least, according to Beihong) still doesn’t make it strong enough for his liking.

‘Please mark the date in your calendars,’ he concludes.

Yuliang surveys her fellow teachers. Only one, a fellow oils instructor, has actually written down the date. Other reactions reflect a familiar spectrum of emotions from indifference to barely stifled insecurity. All, that is, but that of the calligraphy instructor, Shu Meiyi: her broad face reveals something close to outright malice. It’s a look Yuliang encounters fairly often from Teacher Shu and others of her plain, disgruntled colleagues.
I don’t like you
, it says. And:
It’s not fair.
And as intended, it hurt her – at least in the beginning. When Yuliang was still naive enough to believe things might change. She knows better now.

Vaffuncuolo
, she thinks, and even considers accompanying the insult with its peculiarly gratifying hand gesture. She satisfies herself instead with snapping open her sterling silver cigarette case, a farewell gift from fellow students when she left Rome.

‘Ah, excellent. May I?’ Xu Beihong extends his hand. As dean of arts at National Central University the diminutive artist can easily afford his own smokes these days. As the old saying goes, though, rivers and mountains may be malleable; only man’s nature is eternally hard to overcome. It’s a lesson, Yuliang thinks (extending both cigarettes and her lighter) that she seems destined to keep learning. And relearning.

Bending toward the flame, Xu Beihong puffs appreciatively. ‘Now, for the first item…’

The meeting begins with the usual lineup of trivia and complaints: the tardy relinquishment of a classroom by the one o’clock seminar for the two o’clock. The dire need for easels, paints, and models. Xu Beihong uses this opportunity to point out proudly that the plaster
David
he brought from France has been refurbished and will be on display in the Fine Arts Library for students to sketch. ‘Should the current outcry over his loins continue,’ he adds delicately, ‘we’ll consider covering them. Perhaps.’ He clears his throat. ‘Is that all?’

‘As long as we’re on coverage,’ interjects the classics teacher, ‘I was wondering if anyone else would consider a dress code.’

‘A dress code,’ Xu Beihong repeats.

‘At least for the female students. You must have noticed how girls in the art school dress far less’ – he glances at
Yuliang – ‘
appropriately
than those in other departments. Hardly any of them wear
qipao
anymore. And yesterday we saw three skirts that were not only absurdly tight but actually showed the knees.’

‘Really.’

‘Well, when the girls sat down.’

Dean Xu directs a wry glance at Yuliang. She crosses her trousered legs, blows a smoke ring at the ceiling. Her own fondness for pants – not loose-flowing Chinese trousers, but the trim style favored by Dietrich – is another source of much muttered resentment.

‘I see,’ the dean says. ‘And you believe, no doubt, that we should require our young women to adhere more strictly to the standards suggested by Madame Chiang. Skirts safely at shin length, slits no higher than three inches. Ah, and let’s not forget – shirts that cover the entire buttocks. Isn’t that right?’

‘The other disciplines do all that,’ Teacher Shu chimes in staunchly. ‘We stand apart.’

‘We’re
artists
,’ Dean Xu snaps back. ‘No one expects us to dress like damn accountants.’ He takes a swig of his coffee. ‘No dress code. Next item?’

Teacher Shu, undeterred, lifts her plump hand. ‘We were wondering whether the dean has considered our petition yet.’

‘The one on classroom morality?’ he asks. ‘No.’

‘But we gave it to you –’

‘Last month.’ He cuts her off. ‘I know.’

‘Did you read the item on staffing standards?’ she persists.

‘The one on “not permitting persons of dubious
backgrounds and questionable histories to come in excessive contact with our students”? Not a word,’ Dean Xu replies smoothly. ‘And if you ask me why I did not, the answer will remain just the same. It is still my position that no person in this department fits that particular description.’

No one looks at Yuliang. But she still feels the grip of their attention like some vast vise.

‘But…’ Teacher Shu splutters.

‘
That
,’ the dean snaps, ‘is my final word on the subject. If you wish to take it further, you will have to do so with the university president. Or, better yet, Madame Chiang.’

The calligraphy instructor’s round face takes on the approximate color of a ripe eggplant. To celebrate, Yuliang sketches one in her notebook’s margin.

She spends the rest of the meeting as she almost always does: doodling. A cobbled street. The Ponte Vecchio. An orchid. When she looks up, the room is filling with paper rustle and scraping chairs: the staff has been dismissed.

Xu Beihong leans toward her as he pulls his folders together. ‘Ignore them,’ he says quietly. ‘They’re just jealous of your success.’

‘I know,’ she tells him.

And she does. Still, Yuliang throws him a grateful look as she gathers her things. How many times has this man now come to her rescue? He set her up in Paris, wrote her Rome Art Academy recommendation. Over the four years she was there he introduced her to numerous contacts, and secured her participation in several salons and exhibitions. Not least of all, he offered her this job
after her much-publicized split with the Shanghai Art Academy.

Much to Liu Haisu’s delight, the tabloids ran various versions of the story for weeks. How the painter Madame Pan attacked a fellow teacher at the school, how the victim wore a French scarf wrapped around her face for two days afterward (although in Yuliang’s opinion, this was more for dramatic impact than because of injury). What the papers didn’t mention, of course, was that the Hermès-draped instructor (the same woman, in fact, who had made Yuliang’s life a misery as a student) had called Yuliang a whore to her face, in front of students. ‘She’s had that slap coming for twenty years,’ Yuliang fumed when Liu Haisu called her into his office. ‘That woman is a snake.’

In the end, despite a small movement to have Yuliang terminated, Principal Liu asked only that she apologize. But by then Yuliang had had enough. Enough of politics, of tabloids. Enough of the endless scandal. Enough of sleeping alone every night. She’d even had enough of Shanghai: its ever-increasing construction, the tireless scream of the latest everything – cocktail, salon, Negro band. Not to mention the growing signs of Japan’s grim intentions.

Thanks to the League of Nations, Hirohito’s soldiers patrolled the same foreign concessions they’d abruptly attacked in 1932, while China’s troops (which had fought them off for over two months) were barred from their own city. All in all, she’d decided, it was time to leave. And when the invitation came from Xu Beihong, the staid, broad streets of Nanjing seemed a welcome respite.

Still, making her way across campus now, Yuliang can’t brush off a vaguely soiled and sticky feeling. Hurrying past the university’s athletic fields – filled now not with athletes, but with civilians maneuvering in obligatory combat training – she still feels it; as though she’s just pushed through a roomful of spiderwebs. Shutting her eyes briefly, she can all but see them: circular ladders of lethal silken strands. Studded with the crisp carcasses of insects.

At home, she works in the room she’s staked out as both studio and second bedroom on nights when sleeplessness makes her a poor partner in bed. The large window offers glimpses of Nanjing’s tree-lined boulevards. In the east looms Purple Mountain, the resting site of both Sun Yat-sen and the ‘beggar king’ Zhu Yuanzhang, who rose from poverty to found the Ming Dynasty. To the south lies Yuhuatai Shan, Rain of Flowers Mountain. There, the story goes, a monk once chanted sutras so sweetly that the Buddha showered him with flowers. The heavenly blossoms transformed as they fell, into the rainbow-toned stones that now lie scattered across the summit.

Since Chiang Kai-shek assumed the mantle of China’s leadership, however, the mountain has become famous for something else: it is (people whisper) where Communists and other radicals are taken and disposed of. The luckier ones, like Zanhua’s old friend Chen Duxiu, languish in Nationalist prisons. The luckiest of all, like Meng Qihua, have fled to the north with the few Communists whom the government has not yet purged.

Still, despite such dark murmurings, Yuliang has painted
prolifically in this bright little space, producing more than enough work for the two dozen exhibitions she’s been in since returning home nearly eight years ago. The last one, in Nanjing, included her very first political painting, inspired by the National 19th Route Army that fought so bravely against Hirohito’s troops.

Yuliang is intensely proud of
Our Heroes
. She can’t look at it without remembering the shock of those first few weeks – the shriek of Japanese planes, the whistling mortars and roaring bombs. Entire buildings collapsed, as if Shanghai’s perpetual building boom has sudenly gone into reverse. After the all-clear sounded, Yuliang slipped outside, defying curfew to survey her wounded city. Outside, all was eerily quiet; the streets stripped of chatter and motor-purr and the jangle of worldly wealth. It smelled not of cash and coffee but of rubble and soot – and, somewhere behind that, seared flesh.

Amid the temporary quiet, the Red Cross workers helped soldiers pull the corpses into the street. Survivors lined up on the sidewalks, awaiting the attention of foreign doctors. Pausing in the street, Yuliang stepped toward a wounded child who appeared to be lying in a patch of gasoline. The child, however, turned out to be the legless corpse of a small man, the gasoline his dust-darkened blood. It was an image that refused to leave Yuliang, even after she’d finished the painting – a mere twelve hours after she’d fled back to her little house.

Her current project,
Strong Man
, was likewise launched in fury – though as much against her critics as against the Japanese. Five years ago, when Yuliang first returned from Europe, her work was greeted by critics as ‘fresh’
and ‘deftly Western,’ ‘rivaling Manet,’ and even ‘exuding the air of the Old Masters.’ Later, though, as the Generalissimo’s ‘New Life’ program cast its shadow, the tone began to change. ‘Why French countryside, Venetian bridges, and bare-breasted Negroes?’ asked
Shenbao
, in its review of her last show. ‘Is Madame Pan ashamed to paint things that suit Chinese taste and culture?’ The right-leaning
China World
went even further, calling her work ‘pure pornography’: ‘Come to see it if you must. But treat it as you’d treat a flower house: leave your wife and your daughter at home.’